The Bee Sting

by Paul Murray

an A4 page

People imagined poems were wispy things, she said, frilly things, like lace doilies. But in fact they were like claws, like the metal spikes mountaineers use to find purchase on the sheer face of a glacier. By writing a poem, the lady poets could break through the slippery, nothingy surface of the life they were enclosed in, to the passionate reality that beat beneath it. Instead of falling down the sheer face, they could haul themselves up, line by line, until at last they stood on top of the mountain. And then maybe, just maybe, they might for an instant see the world as it really is.

We’re all that kind of person, Miss Grehan said. We all have problems. But often instead of accepting the truth about ourselves, we cover it up. We try to make ourselves the way we think we’re expected to be. So many of the bad things that happen in the world come from people pretending to be something they’re not.

Behind the glare the driver remained invisible; she imagined him looking at them through his windscreen, pale matchstick figures, the colours of their coats flaring up bright.

When he smiled his handsomeness exploded into a million pieces of miraculous light.

He twinkles down at him like God, infinitely able to do everything except understand what you need from him.

Infant of Prague

He told her he loved her it was the first time he’d said it she kissed him the love rushed up inside her like she was literally going to die of pure happiness No one could be as happy as this and live

There was something more that bound them all together So even when things went wrong they paid no heed just kept coming at you like a machine It was the mental preparation she supposed the psychology that Maurice was always banging on about

there’s a roar from all around her that is not just a sound but a wave of energy she feels rising up from under her Lifting her and Daddy and everyone else all together like there is some power at work here

the roar around her is deafening an ocean

The frost burned in the fields the sun burned on the water the same birds as always circled in the sky

It was like he’d forgotten as you would an illness once you are through it

They might have laid her heart there too and buried it with him

His name for Daddy was Garbage McCrowbar

Then as Imelda stepped onto the floor they had left clear for dancing she saw something flash through the back of the room Fleeting white faceless Drawing closer Coming straight towards her through the dark A shimmering bright haze As it rose from the guests At last she thought for what else could it be And her heart rose too soared sang she made for it it made for her At last she thought for one blissful instant Till she saw Dickie there at the apparition’s side and she realized It was her reflection Her own self in the mirror at the back of the room In her veil and white haze of lace That’s all it was Then she understood She was the one Rose had seen in her vision She was the ghost A leftover from another life A remnant of something that was no more That was her Haunting the feast

Isn’t it crazy how the same things come back and back just pulled out of shape

That is the mercy of this part of the world The roads have that many twists and turns You never have to go far to disappear

Unbearable What an unbearable thing is a life

History, the boy scoffed. He waved a hand at the Elizabethan grandeur surrounding them. History’s just a pair of knickers. Pull ’em off and what do you find?

Then he opens his gallery, the photos he took at Trinity: sees her on the step of the haunted red-brick, beneath the college clock, at the site of his accident. In these pictures she is the girl he knows again – scowling, tenebrous, a furious concentration of self-abnegating energy. He wonders if that version of her will disappear entirely now, replaced by the eternally smiling girl from Facebook; if he will look at this picture not so very far from now and think, That was a million years ago.

When he was away at college he always remembered home as different than it was. He’d get nostalgic for the most ridiculous things – pine for a glimpse of Suddz laundry, Dingo’s arcade, become misty-eyed over people he knew, he knew, couldn’t stand him. Holidays magnified the illusion. When he spoke to his mother that May, he could hardly wait to spend four whole months at home!

When they started going to confession, Dickie, who didn’t have any sins of his own, would compile lists of Frank’s, to remind him to tell the priest. But the priest didn’t mind – nobody seemed to mind when Frank did something wrong.

Come on, his father said. Let’s see what you’ve got. Dickie, of course, didn’t have anything; his father dodged his half-hearted attack with ease, and punished him with a slap on the cheek.

But Dickie didn’t, couldn’t: he could only lumber, flail, in a hideous ballet of failure.

Dolly – a tragic case whose only accomplishment to date had been starting to go bald aged sixteen

qui vive,

his father had deep reservations about Dickie attending Trinity, or at least, felt he ought to have deep reservations.)

it was like drinking lightning, very slowly, from a wine glass.

In this setting, even his ugliness took on a new light; it gave him a kind of aristocratic bearing, a seriousness and authority, as if beauty and such fripperies were beneath him.

The boy’s blue eyes stared back at him like rare iridescent insects under glass. All of his intelligence was there in his gaze; it was intimidating, and yet, Dickie felt excited by it, and excited that intelligence could make him feel like that.

The two men stopped there, and looked at one another. And in that moment Dickie learned something. This thing about looking into someone’s eyes. If you’re talking about making a connection, the term is quite misleading. He looked into people’s eyes all the time. What’s really happening in these moments is that you find yourself looking at their eyes – that is, the gaze stops at the eye itself, arrested by the beauty of it; and their gaze does the same at yours; and the two gazes and your souls behind them skate off each other, swirl over each other, like mercury on mercury, so that standing quite still you feel yourself spin out of control, around and around, like a car aquaplaning, until you come to rest again, and you show no sign at all that anything of note has happened, except to permit yourself perhaps a little smile.

In his mind, the poison of lucidity

He never fought Dickie when he was in one of his moods. Then he said, I suppose that’s what everybody wants, isn’t it. To be like everybody else. But nobody is like everybody else. That’s the one thing we have in common.

We’re all different, but we all think everyone else is the same, he said. If they taught us that in school, I feel like the world would be a much happier place.

Perhaps that was what made it hard to accept. He had always assumed happiness was for other people, for the plodders, the norms, the sleepwalkers, as the reward for their blinkered conformism. He felt like he’d been initiated into a secret cult – a group of people who outwardly looked like everybody else, but who concealed a miraculous secret: they were in love.

he seemed to stagger, if you can stagger standing still;

He felt like he had left the real world and entered another, like he was meeting a spirit in the forest who had nothing to do with the day, the person that he met in the kitchen, in the garden, with rings around her eyes. He sat, he laid his hand on her side. In the darkness she was like the reflection that he could bear to see.

They were the same: they fit together, like the shrapnel of a car and the ruin of a garage: she was the only person he could bear to be near.

They were no longer who they were.

If he’d had a gun, this was the moment he would have put it in his mouth.

Georgian architecture.

Tonight, though, Willie was not here to usher him inside, and Dickie felt exactly as meagre and scrawny, as baffled and lost, as he had been that night. It was as if whatever confidence he might have gained in those twenty years, whatever sureness of himself or sense of himself as a man, had suddenly blown away in the breeze, a suit of armour made of dandelion clocks.

Is that why you brought me here, to talk about my grandmother’s recipes?

He delighted in provoking Phil. One time he made him so angry the foreman literally took off his cap and threw it on the ground, something Dickie had never seen outside of cartoons.

Everything seems radiant with itself, and at the same time distant somehow, as if it were receding from him – moving away in time, while he stays where he is. This must be what it feels like to be dying, he thinks; the world remains around you, like a lover who does not want to hurt you by leaving, but in spirit it’s already gone, taking with it the meaning of everything you shared. In truth it is already transforming into a future you will never be part of; and you realize only then that it has been transforming all of this time, throughout your whole life, and you with it; and that, in fact, is life, though you never knew, and now it is over.

He lists his hobbies as suicide ideation and bocce ball.

There are days that simply don’t happen, even when you’re in them.

The thought of addressing it actually seems in some ways worse to us than being killed by it. Or put it another way, the thought of no longer being ourselves is harder for us to get our head around than the thought of being dead.

Now the two of you are outside, sitting on the stone steps of another grand building whose purpose you do not know. Merle – that is her name – is giving her opinions of various things, with a conspicuously un-Irish candour. Some of this candour is charming, for instance when she notes that the moonlight on the cobblestones is very beautiful – an observation, it saddens you to realize, that no one you know, including yourself, would ever make out loud.